Nutshell Thinking

Today I had the opportunity to speak to the ‘Giraffe’ group, a bunch of young Lutheran Christians who spend a month in an intensive learning / camp situation.

I had just 15 minutes to speak to them about Forge / missional church and emerging ecclesiologies. The deal was that I get the quarter hour and then they break… and then any who are interested can come back and chew things around a bit more for the hour after. I was told to expect maybe 2 or 3 of the 25 to come back because it was late in the day and they were all pretty tired.

As I sat waiting to speak to them the presenter before me went overtime, 2 minutes… 5 minutes… 10 minutes… 14 minutes… and as I was waiting I wondered what I would say if I had just one minute – if they were on a tight time schedule (I was hoping they weren’t!)

It made me ponder condensing my spiel into a sentence – or a single memorable thought… It was atually me trying to grapple with the essence of what I am called to – it was a helpful process.

Want to know what I came up with?

As I started to speak to them I said “I believe its fair to say that 90% of your friends will never want to come to a church service with you. overboard free download Do you agree/disagree? How does that make you feel?”

The National Church Life Survey done here in Aus shows that 10% of Australian Christians currently identify/like the way we do church – and 99% of us all do it the same! But 90% don’t like it – maybe 70% of them would even say it sux.

The question I was asking is ‘how do we connect with the 90%?’ How do we connect with those who will never walk thru our doors and never intend to?

I took 15 minutes to discuss this with them… we took a break… 25 out of 25 came back…

Hot topic I’d say…

Great bunch of people too!

Today helped me sharpen my own thinking as to what it is I am on about and how to present it with clarity in a short space of time. How do we live as missionaries in our own land?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *